RAPD, together with its Pro-choice Coalition, are planning a chain of activities devoted to the ongoing International Campaign for Women’s Right to Safe Abortion worldwide (over almost a month around the date). For the Global Day of Action for Access to Safe and Legal Abortion on September, 28, we plan the following activities:

To conduct a workshop on the right to safe and legal abortion with the former, long-standing and new members and supporters of the “Rowan Bunch” Reproductive Choice Coalition;

To write a news report on the Global Day of Action to be published on our websites, the Coalition social media pages and sent to the RAPD regional branches and the 1,500 members of a service providers’ listserve maintained by one of our partner organizations.

In terms of visual media, we keep publicizing on our social media pages videos of a bilingual English/Russian seminar we organized in the summer on the topic of access to abortion as a human right in Central and Eastern Europe, trying to maintain interest and increase knowledge of different aspects and related problems among our audience.

Several videos are going to be published on our Facebook page around September 28.

And on another note, the national news on abortion in Russia

On July 12, Elena Mizulina, the MP who has introduced most anti-abortion amendments in the Russian Parliament (Duma) last year, has now introduced a new proposal that aims at punishing/criminalizing providers of illegal abortions (proposing administrative punishment when, for example, the obligatory waiting period is not respected or when abortion is performed after the 12 weak cut-off). Committing the “offence” twice or more during one year could lead to big fines or up to 3 years in jail. The proposal has been introduced into the State Duma Committee on Constitutional Law and State-Building, and the Committee has not yet taken any further steps with regard to it.

Meanwhile, the famous St Petersburg Regional MP Milonov, author of the scandalous law on the so-called “propaganda of homosexualism”, has introduced a law proposal on the embryo’s rights. The Saint-Petersburg Regional Parliament is going to discuss the law proposal next week (September 17-21), and Milonov hopes that it will be sent then to the State Duma.

There are also, however, some positive changes we can report. After WHO issued its new Safe Abortion Guidance for Health Systems, the Russian Ministry of Healthcare and Social Development accordingly has initiated the development of its new Regulations (Poryadok= Order) on performance of abortion for medical institutions.